Graeme Archer works as a statistician, and is a winner of the Orwell Prize for Political Blogging. He writes a column in Saturday's Daily Telegraph.

Everybody hates a tourist

Don't worry, I'm not going to fasten a painful political metaphor onto the terraced housing, cracked and soon to be demolished, in Amhurst Road in Hackney. But last night, again, I couldn’t sleep, and in the long dark hours my mind kept nagging at images of the street I used to know very well. Perhaps describing it will exorcise it.

There is a novel in whose opening pages the anti-hero reflects about the difficulty he has in keeping up his cool front, the one he adopts in order to impress the women he picks up in the West End; his facade begins to crumble, when he’s cabbing them back to Hackney at the end (/beginning) of the night. The character says something about watching the women's faces turn from excitement to concern, as the journey lasts just a "couple of bridges" too far. (I'm almost certain it's an Irvine Welsh novel, but I can't remember.)

The thing is, I remember the passage because I know what the protagonist meant. (The tense is important and the point of this piece.) Not about picking up women in the West End, obviously, but the sense, back in those late 20th century days, of living just a little beyond the pale. "Everyone" (the mega-bucks barristers who led New Labour and their media hangers-on) lived in Islington. “Everyone else” (people on normal salaries) moved a mile or so East, and set up home in Hackney.

Two parentheses: no one under 30 will be able to get their head around that ("people preferred Islington to HACKNEY?!") I'm also quite aware that lots of Londoners – the born and bred ones – didn't move anywhere, and must object to reading about their boroughs as though the subject of some anthropological discourse. I chose the title of the blog deliberately, self-loathing being the co-morbid bedfellow of a sleepless night.

But there was a churn in Hackney's population. Someone else could describe the (relatively) lower property prices and its attraction to artists, and their outriders, the hipsters; others might reflect on the tech/IT centre around Old Street, which has pushed the bounds of Shoreditch further and further along the Hackney Road, towards the magnetic attractor of London Fields and Broadway Market.

I remember Broadway Market when it was cold and dark and, other than The Dove, not a place you’d linger. The Cat and Mutton was not a gastropub. London Fields Lido was a residual, historical imprint, fenced off, abandoned by the municipal vandals (Hackney moves forwards despite its politicians, almost never because of them.)

It’s only with hindsight that it all seems inevitable (the gentrification, the hipster-fication.) I don’t see that decade at the start of the 21st century through the lens of the political scientist. I see it through the memories of the men and women in whose lives “Hackney” was a near tangible character; that is: in the lives of my friends.

James. It was James I remembered last night. A banker! Imagine that. He lived in a flat, so high above the street that at new year we could see the fireworks south of the river. We became friends through common politics, ridiculously drunk Sunday afternoons in the Royal Oak on Columbia Road, and a dash of bourgeois outrage.

We may have acted like the students on Sundays. The rest of the week we worked and wanted the best for our “town”. (I know why cockneys say “manor”.) We despaired at the forces that dragged Hackney down; the constant churn (that word again) as the world’s dispossessed were sent there to live, the seemingly impregnable linguistic and cultural barriers between ethnicities (very few Anglo-Saxons had close African friends, very few Turkish had close Anglo-Saxon friends, and so on; I hope that this is changing among the new/next generation.)

The anti-social swaggering on the street. The futility of expecting that an election might put things right at the Town Hall. (The anger at the minority white middle-class, proud of their totemic Left-wing votes.) The stabbings (the London Field Boys.)

So when you found something good, something inspiring, you cherished it, as you might instinctively seek to shelter a snowdrop, exposed at the side of a motorway. Even something as nondescript as a new business.

Which is why I remember Amhurst Road. A new bar and restaurant had opened. James reported it was pleasant. Why not meet there after work for a drink? We did, and we liked it. “This guy [whoever owned it] is trying to do something good for the place,” we thought. “We should encourage enterprises like this. They make life better for all of us.”

The place burned down or collapsed in, I think, 2003. All I know is that one day we were sat on one of its sofas, the next time I walked past it was gone. On that occasion, the green shoots failed to take hold. (I’m sure there’s an explanation of the fire on the web somewhere. I can’t bear to look, to be honest.) The bar was at the end of that gap you can see in the photos of Nos 1-5 Amhurst Road.

Which is why the downfall of the rest of the block unsettles me, I think. Because the protagonist of that novel was ultimately mistaken; it was James’s hopeful instincts about the borough that were correct, at least to the extent that in the space of ten years, the E8 postcode flashed from being “where?” to “there”. No one would bother heading West now, not in search of mere sexual pleasure.

But the progress isn’t uniform. The 2011 riots were our own last straw, and we left. It wasn't a lack of love for the place that took us away. It was tiredness (perhaps why my insomniac thoughts tend back there so often.)

Amhurst Road’s residents didn’t leave, and that area around Hackney Central seemed to rebuild and prosper: a new restaurant opened and the London Fields effect now stretches farther north, the much sneered-at hipsters bringing the money that fuels the businesses that will demand good schools which will attract more families which … and so on: the optimist’s growth cycle.

But now Nos 1-5 will be demolished, completing the gap whose first appearance dismayed me a decade ago. Goodbye to that chunk of Amhurst Road. Thanks for those days of beer, and energy, and hope.